Collaborating with Developing Countries Posted on November 30, 2007 Vishwajit Nimgaonkar (bio) describes the development of long-lasting collaborations in India and Egypt.

We are a little bit different from other groups that do research which is that when we engage in collaborations, we believe in making it a very equal collaboration that can last a long time. And this becomes a problem right away when we are working in developing countries. There very often are people that want to do research, but don’t know how or don’t have the resources. And so our philosophy always has been to try and help people to grow there as they engage in the research.

And we’ve been very lucky actually to get support from the Fogarty International Center, which I mentioned before is an arm of the NIH. And they have these mechanisms available for helping the collaborating institution to build up as they go along. And so in this instance for example, we were lucky actually in Egypt to have had a trainee come from Egypt to train with us. And in fact that’s how the project got started. A collaborator in Egypt, Hader Mansour, who has a foot in Pittsburgh and in Mansura.

With his help, we were able to contact researchers there. We phoned some people who had done some research in the area that we were interested in. And we recently received an R21 grant, which will enable us to select some faculty members or junior faculty in Mansura, and they’ll be coming here to train with us for a short while and will then go back to do field work.

So what we are trying to do is to really further our research. And along the way also help train people. And Dr. Hader Mansour is a very good example of a person who came without any research experience, trained here, has now built a bridge to Mansura and is helping us to train more people there. So we hope that when our project finishes, by the time our project finishes, by the time our research finishes, there will be enough people there with enough expertise to be able to get funding independently.

And this mechanism has worked very well for us in India. In fact the group in India that we collaborate with now has their own research support and are following other kinds of research ideas that they have quite independently of us.

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